The presentation game works as either a party game or a lab meeting activity. The aim of the aim is to present a set of slides that you’ve never seen before, and on a topic you know nothing about.

This can have multiple benefits:

• Practice presenting
• Learning to keep to time (this is a sign of respect for your audience!)
• Learning to think on your feet
• Get comfortable with public speaking
• Open discussions about the best and worst ways to design slides (e.g. is there too much text? Is the data understandable? What makes up a ‘hideous’ slide?)
• Open discussions about what (not) to do when presenting a talk (e.g. facing the audience, projecting your voice, excessive laser-pointer waving)
• HAVE FUN!

Generally the rules are that each person is randomly allocated a set of slides they’ve never seen before, and you get 5 minutes to present. If it’s at a party, then it can be more free-form, but if it’s a lab activity, then I recommend encouraging people to ask questions about the content, and make notes about the presenter style and pros/cons of the slides to discuss at the end.